Humanizing The Vacuum

After one of those loud, garrulous arguments last Friday with my parents from which no one left satisfied or ever said “Glass-Steagall” aloud, what a relief to read a letter which encapsulates why I support Occupy Wall Street, posted on the site of a man whose attraction to supermen and gullibility when it comes to believing the honeyed words of those in power is well-documented:

When the financial industry came to the brink of collapse because of the reckless behavior of these “too big to fail” corporations, we saw an amazing ability for our government to come together to bail them out. In return, they’ve repaid the favor by working night and day to lift the already watered-down provisions of the Dodd-Frank reforms so they can continue with their same insanity, and to basically act like spoiled, entitled brats towards those of us who saved their butts in the first place.

Contrast this with any legislation in Congress that might actually help out rank-and-file Americans, and suddenly everything becomes gridlocked and impossible to achieve. From out here, it appears that when you have a lobby on your side, government works, and if you don’t, well tough luck.

We march for three simple things: tighter regulation of the financial industry (a return to Glass-Steagall would be a big step), a demand for shared sacrifice amongst *100%* of this country, and to wake up those in Congress who have been listening only to the lobbyists and the media chattering classes, and losing sight of the fact that this country is a DEMOCRACY, of the people, by the people, and for the people.

These are not radical notions, and they’re not even strictly left-wing (personal responsibility seems like a classic conservative belief to me). This is the no-longer silent majority in this country, across the spectrum, who have finally had enough.

Fairness really.

Andrew Sullivan prints a relevant letter:

Do you think that it is possible for a homosexual person to not have to come out of the closet. I don’t mean stay closeted for always and ever. I mean never even enter the closet. For instance, I’ve asked my oldest son if he thinks anybody in his class is cute. I’m careful how I phrase it. I don’t ask if he thinks any of the girls are cute. I leave it open so that he can answer honestly. Do you think an LGBT youth could grow up and never step foot in the closet (at least with immediate family), thus making the coming out process (with the immediate family) obsolete? Can a family be so okay with homosexuality that, say, a fifth grade boy could tell his mom very comfortably that the boy in class in a Chargers jersey and still outgrowing his baby fat (or Baby Phat, who knows) is totes amazeballs?

New parents: have you experience with this yet?

I don’t recall when I started reading Andrew Sullivan. I’m pretty sure I read Love Detectable first. I still recommend this masterful collection of essays devoted to platonic male friendship, the case for homosexual marriage, and living with AIDS for skeptics who have never forgiven him for his insane, inane support for the Iraq War and stating that American liberals would unite to form a “fifth column” with Islamists. Let me quote him directly (the link is dead, alas): “[W]e might as well be aware of the enemy within the West itself – a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column that will surely ramp up its hatred in the days and months ahead.” This is the language of Robert Bork and Ann Coulter: an attack on the intellect that Sullivan himself would repudiate when Trig’s Mother or whatever he calls Sarah Palin these days uses it. Actually, the sentence does not qualify as language — it’s an excrescence unworthy of Khmer Rouge agitprop.

These days Sullivan exists for me as a metonym for an hour-by-hour mastication of sociopolitical currents: free of id, not without humility, given to boyish crushes on leaders who radiate granitic moderation or, alternately, leaders whose “boldness” he can pimp as contrarianism (as a cherub flapping around the Reagan diadem in the eighties he must have loved Richard Nixon’s Six Crises). His latest infatuation: Paul Ryan and the budget plan which has put the Beltway punditocracy in a ten-day swoon. Longtime critic Juan Cole will have none of it; but one of Cole’s commenters posted the smartest observation:

Andrew has two… I think needs is the right word, although that comes off as a little presumptuous, and they show with intensity in his writing. The first and by far the most pronounced (and the creepiest) is a need to have a leader he really believes in. I mean REALLY believes in, that he can hurl himself into the cult of personality of completely and wholeheartedly. Reagan, then (and to an extent still) Obama, then David Cameron, then Paul Ryan.

The problem is that he’s smart enough to (eventually) see reality when its waved under his nose. Longtime readers will have noticed that the bloom is DEFINITELY off the rose when it comes to Obama, and that his hymns to Reaganism have gone from ‘constant’ to ‘nearly non-existent’ over the years. It’ll happen with Ryan too, and even faster.

The second and less obvious need is to believe that the universe REALLY CAN be made to work along conservative, market-driven lines. For all he claims that conservatism isn’t an ideology, he believes in it with the same fervidity as he does his Catholicism. And so anytime someone comes forth with an agenda that even has the blush of credibility, he is all over it.

Read the whole thing. This latest eye-roller won’t keep me from reading Sullivan, but it’s a helpful reminder of what the blogging class considers matters of consequence are frivolities to the rest of us.

Andrew Sullivan‘s provided lots of entertainment in the nine years I’ve read him, and it’s proper that he devotes a moment to self-congratulation. Not a whole day though.

I don’t watch Jon Stewart regularly, and the stuff I watch occasionally gets obnoxious (the audience convinces itself his jokes are totally gutbusting), but his interview with Bill O’Reilly does a much better job articulating what’s wrong with FOX News, “narratives,” and Sarah Palin (not to mention underlining how well Barack Obama, the new Chairman Mao, has treated his Wall Street paymasters) than Barack Obama himself.

Watch the unexpurgated clip here; what aired on “The O’Reilly Factor” was edited to make Stewart look like a glib douche.

(h/t Andrew Sullivan)

Margaret Coakley lost because she was a liberal, and the grand liberal experiment of the last twelve months has failed. Let’s see. Obama is a liberal because he:

(a) hired Rahm Emmanuel as chief of staff?

(b) filled his Cabinet with former Wall Street and New York Fed scions like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner?

(c) endorsed a health care reform bill that eschews a public option for mandatory coverage that effectively fattens the pockets of the insurance lobby?

(d) has expanded the war in Afghanistan beyond the Bush administration’s dreams?

(e) implicitly endorses indefinite detention of terrorism suspects?

(f)  kept Bush’s defense secretary, a colorless hack whose most notable achievement was letting the press forget he was involved in Iran-Contra?

(g) encouraged Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to court Maine senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins?

(h) has not proposed a second stimulus?

Or, as Andrew Sullivan concluded:

But if one had traveled to Mars and back this past year and read this statement, what would you assume had happened? I would assume that the banks had been nationalized, the stimulus was twice as large, that single-payer healthcare had been pushed through on narrow majority votes, that card-check had passed, that an immigration amnesty had been legislated, that prosecutions of Bush and Cheney for war crimes would be underway, that withdrawal from Afghanistan would be commencing, that no troops would be left in Iraq, that Larry Tribe was on the Supreme Court, that DADT and DOMA would be repealed, and so on.

I defy a self-professed Republican to refute any of these charges; the first one to use the phrase “perception of liberalism” gets my collected Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. tossed at his pharynx. What the American public rightly perceives is Barack Obama’s reluctance to choose the difficult, politically perilous choices that would at least earn their respect. Remembering the midterm rout of 2006, it’s amazing to think that George W. Bush, after listening to the “message” voters that “sent,” ignored the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations (remember that farrago?) and sent more troops to Iraq. Hubris, naturally. Almost admirable.

I’d also issuing an open call to Democrats: what does liberalism look like? After living in an era of conservatism regnant since 1980 (arguably 1974, but we can discuss that too) I don’t know what “LBJ-style” liberalism means.

Andrew Sullivan on Barack Obama’s disgraceful, cliche-studded speech at the Human Rights Campaign dinner last night: “His major achievement – the one thing he has actually done – is invite gay families to the Easter egg-roll.”

And: “Now he’s pivoting away from his responsibility and the Democratic party’s responsibility and changing the subject to health care reform, Iraq, Afghanistan – as if gay soldiers are not already in Afghanistan being discriminated against by him.”

Never let it be said that Andrew Sullivan doesn’t risk looking like a fool. Beyond the fevered prose and invocations to the Divine, today’s post on  sex-as-expunging-of-self proves, once again, how differently we all view the impact of body heat:

I have had sex out of love and it’s an amazing, wonderful, transformative thing. At its height, it is the most overwhelming thing I have ever experienced. I have also had sex in my life largely as a way to escape this fucking brain in my head, that won’t stop constantly analyzing and thinking. I have had sex for these reasons as well – so I can gain a few blissful moments when I do not think at all. The relief of this is indescribable and, for me at least, an element of mental and psychological health.

. It sounds saner in context. Believe me, I sympathize with the notion that sex is an essential component of health. But sex at its best doesn’t occlude thinking — it sharpens it, puts you and your partner in relief.